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How "out of date" is Debian really? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I hear that a lot but, how bad is it really? Does it affect you (if you use Debian)? Aren't there ways to install newer versions of most things that actually matter?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah it's pretty out of date. You might then "eh that doesn't matter, I like things to be stable and I'll just imagine I'm three years in the past".

That works until some software introduces a bug fix or a new feature that you really need and you can't use it because of your distro's weird update policies.

You will very quickly find that you don't care anywhere near as much about theoretical stability as you do about a concrete feature or bugfix that is available but inaccessible.

I say theoretical because in practice Debian stable isn't really much more stable than more up-to-date distros. It just has fewer new bugs and more old bugs.

They might try to claim they backport fixes for the old bugs, but in reality they don't have the manpower to do that for 100k packages or whatever it is. They do it for critical bugs of very important packages but that's it.